USING MICROBLOGGING IN A WORK PLACE CONTEXT

Twitter is the new Web 2.0 hype in the media. Techies, politicians, family members and many more use Twitter to keep in touch with their interest groups, their voters or their beloved ones. Drawing on Computer Supported Work Research, we ask what Twitter can achieve for us at the work place. On the premise that Twitter supports awareness of others we investigate how awareness in a team can be improved by Twitter such to increase team performance. Probing Twitter in a team of seven researchers, we find that Twitter is used much differently in an organisational setting than one might expect from the experiences in recreational settings. Indeed our results confirm that Twitter-mediated awareness can positively influence group performance. However, awareness information is only conveyed if users are motivated to post status updates. To our suprise extrinsic incentives play a much greater role for using Twitter than we would assume from leisure use of the system. Furthermore, we find that usage is facilitated by various conditions. Our results suggest that both the motivation to use Twitter as well as Twitter-enhanced group performance are critically dependent on two contengencies: task interdependence and task similarity..... []